Thinking up a topic for content generation via Keyword Research / Mining

August 10, 2007

We’ve all had problems, one way or another, when it comes to content generation. Be it for a blog or for a company website, or even for a client of yours. The main problem which I will address in this post is the process of formulating a topic within your niche to write about, which is one of the most common problem you will encounter during your content generation process.

Lets start by placing you in a hypothetical, yet common, scenario. You are working on a new website, lets say for illustrative sake, a mobile technology blog and you are trying to think of what to write. You’ve been running this website for approximately 2 months and all you’ve wanted to write has basically been written. You’re scratching your head running out of idea and ready to put up your keyboard to retire.

Now hold that thought, I’m about to teach you something which is used by good content generators on a daily basis, and that is keyword research / mining. This is a very simple concept of discovering keywords with the historical traffic data you have collected during the operation of your website as well as using a few different keyword tools.

To keep things simple I have decided to list them in point form, everyone likes lists =).

Steps to find a topic for content generation

Collect a list of long tail keywords which users find you with (search engine referrals). There are several ways to do this, the most notable way would be via Google analytics. Google analytics provides in depth traffic sources and if its from search engines, the keywords which was used to find you. Another way is via Hittail, a free & paid keyword research tool used to track the keywords you rank on.

Order your list of long tail keywords starting with the keyword which received the least traffic. You will work with the keywords with the least traffic first so you increase your search dominance on these less ranked keywords.

Take the first keyword on the list and throw it into a keyword suggestion tool. There is currently two I use, one being Google keyword suggestion, and the other being Yahoo’s Overture keyword tool. I prefer to use Overture’s keyword tool as it actually shows you the number of searches per keyword which helps you determine which keyword to target first.

Take the top 5 to 10 keywords from the keyword suggestion tool and store them in a spread sheet with the original long tail keyword as the heading. These are they keyword which will make up the topic for content generation.

Derive the topic from the related keywords and use the top 5 keywords within the content body.

There you go, 5 simple steps to make a topic for a blog post or press release. Hopefully this is easy enough for you to understand, however feel free to contact me if you have any questions.